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How to increase the maximum number of ActiveSync Devices for a User

By default Exchange 2010 limits users to a maximum of 10 devices. While this limit might seem more than adequate, you might find in today’s tablet-driven world, you need to increase it…

Exchange ActiveSync devices are popping up everywhere, from being the only way to connect to Exchange from the new Surface RT tablet, an option in the new Outlook 2013, to the preferred way to connect just about every Android tablet, phone and i-Device on the market.

One component of Exchange, throttling policies by default limits users to a maximum number of device relationships and concurrent devices. And there’s a difference between the two – it’s feasible a user might have a couple of Windows 8 PCs, and rarely use one connected to Exchange, replaces their devices fairly regularly and doesn’t remove older devices immediately, or simply upgrades the firmware on their Android device at every opportunity and re-creates the device relationship. Whatever the reason, you might want to consider increasing the maximum number of devices for these users.

We can increase this limit by creating a new Throttling Policy with non-default settings and assigning it to the user (or multiple users) via the Exchange Management Shell.

To create the new policy, we’ll use the New-ThrottlingPolicy cmdlet and increase the number of devices and concurrent devices to 20:

Once in place, the user can now have up to 20 devices connected to Exchange, and you can re-use the policy against other users. If you later decide to increase or decrease this limit, you can simply change the single policy we’ve created and set the number of and concurrent devices to a different number: